Google’s Step in the Right Direction

Google has finally made a step in the right direction vis a vis its relationship with China. They announced last week (sorry for the delay in writing on it) that they would move all of their search records out of China to prevent the records from having to be turned over to the Chinese government.

The Mountain View, Calif., company has decided to store search records from the site outside of China in order to prevent that government from being able to access the data without Google’s consent, said Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, speaking Monday at a panel discussion at Santa Clara University.

“We didn’t want to be in the position of having to hand over these kinds of records to the government,” he said.

Google retains information on the search queries performed by its users, along with the IP addresses associated with queries, to better understand how its search engine is being used, Norvig said.

It’s fortunate that Google is protecting their users’ search records in a way that Yahoo has refused to do, though the move begs a few questions about Google’s China policy and the example it is setting for other US tech companies.

First, Google should have made clear from the beginning that they wouldn’t store their google.cn user records inside China. It’s laudable that are refusing to do so now and they should encourage other US internet companies to do the same.

Second, if Google is concerned about having to turn over records to the Chinese government, with the implication that this violation of user privacy will have negative implications for the victims, why would Google partner its services with the Chinese government in the first place? If China’s desire for oversite of internet search records is threatening to people looking for information inside China, why would Google only now taking the potential dangers seriously? More to the point, what exactly is Google (rightly) afraid of and why do they care? I’ll answer that question: Google is scared they will have to turn over information that is used to jail a journalist, blogger, dissident, or democracy advocate. They know that doing so is both unethical and disgraceful and want to avoid a backlash in the US for sending someone to jail for thought crimes. Again, I think it’s good that Google is finally realizing how dangerous a partner the CCP is, but it’s ever more puzzling that Google will continue to justify its partnership with China by backing away from it.

Third, Google can best protect its users from the Chinese government by not storing any of their search data. Google is not required to store the data, either by law or operating agreements. Storing it anywhere, even outside of China, preserves the possibility that it can later be used against Tibetan and Chinese internet users. EFF discussed this in their open letter to Congress last month:

The most dangerous information that Internet companies can have about their users is personally identifiable information. For those living under repressive governments, their Internet service’s ability to identify them as the person who made the search query about “democracy,� or sent the email reporting about human rights violations can literally make the difference between life and death.

With the stakes so high in countries like China, no Internet company should gather more information than they absolutely need about their customers and no Internet company should keep that information any longer than is absolutely necessary to provide the requested service.

Neither China nor any other major repressive country that we are aware of currently requires Internet companies to gather or keep identifying information in most circumstances. In order for companies to avoid becoming agents that enable ongoing human rights violations, they must change their current policies to avoid collecting personally identifiable data in the first instance and avoid keeping any data they collect any longer than absolutely necessary.

In addition to keeping their search records out of China, Google can better protect their Tibetan and Chinese users by only storing search records for a matter of hours. We all know that data mining user records and selling demographic information is a major source of revenue for companies like Google, but they need to recognized the danger they’re placing on people living under the Chinese government’s brutal regime. Clearly Google has an inkling of the risks – they simply need to go all the way towards doing the right thing and permanently denying the Chinese government access to information about google.cn users.

Lastly there is one dangerously misleading statement made by Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig.

But political issues aren’t really paramount to most users in China, Norvig said.

“What’s important to users is access to information,” he said. “We’re giving them that, and we think that’s the most important. We’d like to give them all the information, but we just can’t.

“Some of the people want to query about democracy, but most of them just want to know about their pop stars.”

Eliot Schrage, Google’s VP of Global Communications and Public Affairs, said in his testimony before Congress that Google “estimate[s] that fewer than 2% of all search queries in China would result in pages from which search results would be unavailable due to filtering.” In response to this I wrote:

Google refuses to drop it’s “politics aren’t important� line. The notion that 2% is an insignificant number, when there are only a few hundred filtered terms, is simply preposterous. Two percent represents hundreds of thousands of searches every week [day] by people longing for unfettered access to the truth. Google is saying that these people don’t matter, a statement that they safely make from the halls of uncensored Washington and Mountain View California.

I think it’s tremendously important that the free world not sell millions of people in Tibet and China out because there are a few more millions of people that care about pop stars as well as politics. No matter how you slice the comments of Norvig and Schrage, Google seems prepared to discount twenty-six million people (at their own bare minimum estimates) from having any ability to find true information about freedom, democracy, and human rights. This is simply appalling.

If you need help understanding how important China’s internet censorship is, try envisioning what the US political world would look like if all political blogs were banned. Approximately 2-3% of the American electorate reads political blogs (which incidentally shows that Google’s estimates for Chinese and Tibetan political interested are comparable to America’s). If we were to prevent these people (myself notably included) from having, reading, and searching political blogs on Google in the US and by extension created a climate that censored all political information not approved by the government, the shape of our democracy would be immeasurably altered. So just imagine the loss of the voice of every American political blogger to understand the volume of impact Google is talking about when it devalues 2% of China’s population.



One Responseto “Google’s Step in the Right Direction”

1. Bob Gould says:

   April 17, 2006 at 6:59 pm

   The reasons Google has stepped back from it’s previous position is because of bad press & pressure from rights groups such as SFT. Keep up the good work!
2. Enable Spam Filtering says:

   February 26, 2008 at 2:38 pm

   6 Ways To Avoid And Filter Spam…

   1 of the complaints I hear a lot about is the amount of email people get – especially the…